It happened again. The Great Revealing

From Australia Election Results: Prime Minister Scott Morrison Seizes a Stunning Win by Damien Cave.

SYDNEY, Australia — Scott Morrison, Australia’s conservative prime minister, scored a surprise victory in federal elections on Saturday, propelled by a populist wave — the “quiet Australians,” he termed it — resembling the force that has upended politics in the United States, Britain and beyond.

The win stunned Australian election analysts — polls had pointed to a loss for Mr. Morrison’s coalition for months. But in the end, the prime minister confounded expectations suggesting that the country was ready for a change in course after six years of tumultuous leadership under the conservative political coalition.

How much did he win by? Did he pick up seats? Did he pick up votes? The NYT is in such shock at yet another rebuke of the voting public against the Mandarin Class that they don't actually get around to reporting the facts. They are too busy spinning them. You have to go to Wikipedia to get those basic facts.

As of today, Sunday, only about 75% of the votes have been counted and it will be another week before the final configuration of the new parliament will emerge. But everyone seems to have conceded a major upset of the anticipated resurgence of the Australian Labour Party which campaigned on Global Warming and Income Inequality.

Click to enlarge.

The Liberal Party (i.e. conservatives, Classical Liberals) seem to have picked up at least four seats, and bested the Labour Party by at least 8% of the popular vote.

And the Mandarin Class did not, once again, see it coming.

It is fascinating to read the mainstream media reporting. Reality keeps assaulting their priors. In this news account by Cave you get a number of sly digs. Except, I suspect they are not digs, they are a product of his unexamined priors.

The conservative victory also adds Australia to a growing list of countries that have shifted rightward through the politics of grievance, including Brazil, Hungary and Italy. Mr. Morrison’s pitch mixed smiles and scaremongering, warning older voters and rural voters in particular that a government of the left would leave them behind and favor condescending elites.

The politics of grievance? That's your take-away. The Labour Party campaigned on social justice with all its costly ideological baggage of income inequality and global warming. The global warming movement in Australia has already hit Australians pretty hard with rising costs and increasing power interruptions. The Liberal Party campaigned on pocketbook issues and jobs. That is not the politics of grievance. That is the politics of hope.

The Mandarin Class are in constant dismay that voters keep choosing prosperity, consent of the governed, rule of law over anarchy, corruption and ideological compulsion. So dismayed that they keep falling back on threadbare excuses such as the politics of grievance, false consciousness, and voter ignorance.

This was one more election pitting the Mandarin Class against ordinary people and ordinary people chose a better life.

France, Britain, Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands, Brazil, Hungary - The list goes on and on of ordinary citizens choosing a pragmatic, reality-based view of the future over the delusions of the Mandarin Class. And yet the mainstream media, paid-up members of the Mandarin Class, just do not seem to see what is going on. They keep pitching repressive ideology and they do not understand why people everywhere are rejecting that option.

Cave's concluding, incomplete and fundamentally flawed analysis is:

Australian voters ultimately stuck with what they knew, while also tilting toward personality. They rejected policies that would have altered the financial status quo, including efforts to cut back on tax perks for older and wealthier voters, and went along with the more energetic politician.

Nope. Go read the data again and come back when you understand.

And actually he did. And still got it wrong. When I was googling for the actual election results, one of the first articles was today's reporting by Cave, twenty-four hours after the election. From It Was Supposed to Be Australia’s Climate Change Election. What Happened? by Damien Cave. Well, yes, the Mandarin Class did want it to be a referendum on Global Warming. And yet again, ordinary Australians were having none of it. Once again the mainstream media laid the groundwork for one outcome and were revealed to not know what they were talking about when voters delivered and entirely different outcome.

Cove writes:

Even for skeptics, the effects of climate change are becoming harder to deny. Australia just experienced its hottest summer on record. The country’s tropics are spreading south, bringing storms and mosquito-borne illnesses like dengue fever to places unprepared for such problems, while water shortages have led to major fish die-offs in drying rivers.

“This is all playing out in real time, right now,” said Joëlle Gergis, an award-winning climate scientist and writer from the Australian National University. “We are one of the most vulnerable nations in the developed world when it comes to climate change.”

Granted, Cove is still relatively new to Australia and does not have much education around its history given his BA in English from Boston College and his MS in Journalism from Columbia. Australia has always been in drought conditions virtually its entire history; if not one part of the country then another. Australia has always had grave policy issues with land use policy (agricultural land, rivers and dams) which brought wrenching change and often destruction which have absolutely nothing to do with the hypothesized global warming.

Recent anthropogenic global warming as an ideological belief may all be very real for Cove but for born and bred Australians, harsh climate has always been the name of the game. Ballads about droughts and fire are legion. The environmental tragedies of the Murray-Dowling Basin are long-standing and nothing to do with global warming and everything to do with land use policy.

Consequently, Australians are somewhat jaundiced about the attempt to assign longstanding weather conditions to the ideology of recent human CO2 emissions. They are also jaundiced by the repeated attempts to rewrite the Australian temperature data sets to make it appear to be getting warmer. Those exposés were coming out as far back as the mid- to late 1990s when I was living there.

Cove is sufficiently self-aware that he can note:

In some ways it was a clash of cultures as well as political views.

“I feel like there’s quite a lot of scorn about the way Queenslanders feel about environmental issues, and that doesn’t help,” said Susan Harris-Rimmer, a law professor at Griffith University in Queensland. “The predominant Queensland characteristic is pride and you can’t pour scorn on them.”

She said doing so was a strategic mistake for politicians comparable to Hillary Clinton’s description of some Donald Trump supporters as “deplorables” during the 2016 United States presidential election.

“You can’t trigger the pride response,” Ms. Harris-Rimmer said.

Scholars of Australian populism agree, arguing that the weakening of the major parties and the country’s tilt to the right have been driven mainly by class envy and alienation, including the belief that the elite do not understand the needs and values of the working class.

Not just Queenslanders. The Australian Mandarin Class suffer just as much oikophobia and are just a dismissive of the plodding middle class and bitter clingers as their peers anywhere. Maybe more so, given their instinctive cultural cringe. The Australian Mandarin Class absolutely do not want to be seen to be falling behind their European and North American counterparts in vociferous virtue signaling. Even if it costs them elections.

How one could miss the mismatch between the elitism and disdain of the Mandarin Class and the long noted and discussed egalitarianism, cussed bloody-mindedness of Australians, and complete lack of deference to credentials or status is something of a mystery. Failing to note the mismatch ensures fitful and surprisingly ineffective campaigns.

Cove reveals the near totality of his blinkers in his concluding paragraphs.

Neither One Nation nor United Australia did as well as similar parties recently in countries like Italy, Hungary and Brazil. But for Australia, where compulsory voting encourages moderate election outcomes, the results defied expectations and made clear that the country remains deeply conservative and open to the far right on a variety of issues.

The question that now confronts the new government is how much sway to give the forces that led to victory. Climate change may be the first battle in the long war that is reshaping democracy all over the world.

"The country remains deeply conservative and open to the far right"? Deeply moderate perhaps, but certainly not deeply conservative or far right. It could only appear to be deeply conservative and far right to a yankee foreigner, relatively new to the shores, steeped in a far left ideology of postmodernism and social justice and deeply committed to the idea that those with credential must know better than everyone else. An attitude about as alien to the average Australian as the idea that the British are superior cricketers.

"Climate change may be the first battle in the long war that is reshaping democracy all over the world." What does that even mean? I would argue that the ideological commitment to the totalitarian nature of the AGW campaign has been one of the great catalysts to the populist revolt against the Mandarin Class. AGW is not a first battle or even recent battle. The AGW battle started decades ago and is culminating with its rejection across the world. Cove seems to have his timelines all wrong. The case was made and is now being rejected in country after country and he thinks it is just starting? Well . . .

Cove's incapacity to separate a rejection of the Mandarin Class by voters as a distinct issue separate from the rejection of AGW totalitarianism by voters is yet a further occluding filter which seems to hamper his capacity to report accurately or even usefully.